Two Different Creation Accounts, Not One

Genesis contains two distinct accounts of woman's creation that do not fit together as smoothly as a single continuous narrative would. The first chapter states that God created humankind, male and female, together in a single act, with no distinction of order or priority between them. The following chapters instead describe a sequential creation, the man formed first, followed later by woman built from his rib to be a suitable companion. Source-critical biblical scholarship, developed over more than a century of study of the Hebrew Bible, generally explains this doubling as evidence of two originally separate textual traditions later combined by an editor, rather than one author describing the same event twice for emphasis. This tension in the text left room for later interpretive tradition to develop its own explanations.

Medieval Jewish folklore, most famously the later work known as the Alphabet of Ben Sira, proposed that the first account describes a separate first woman, Lilith, created as Adam's equal and expelled after refusing subordination to him, with Eve created afterward from the rib to resolve the conflict the first arrangement had caused. This Lilith tradition is considerably later than Genesis itself and is not treated as scripture by mainstream Judaism, but it shows how a real textual seam in the ancient account of Eve's creation was still being actively interpreted and reworked many centuries afterward.